Title: Brooke Baldwin on "Unraveling"

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Alison: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you're here. On today's show, Christian McBride will be here. He's going to share some tracks from his forthcoming album. It is called, Without Further Ado, Vol 1, and a film where you'll recognize the backdrop. It's a romantic dramedy filmed here in New York City. It's called Love Brooklyn, and we'll speak with its director, Rachael Holder, and actor Nicole Beharie. Big news about our September Get Lit with All Of It book club. We are back, and we have big, big plans. Details on that coming up. That is our plan. Let's get this started with finding your new path.

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Alison: Whether it's layoffs or a struggle to find meaningful work, so many Gen Xers and millennials are facing a tough reality right now. Former CNN anchor, Brooke Baldwin, knows that experience firsthand, after more than a decade anchoring her own daily news show. After being in millions of living rooms, after countless interviews with presidents, politicians, even astronauts, she was fired from her dream job.

Instead of letting it break her, she calls that painful moment of her start the unraveling. It isn't messy, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Although it can be messy and it can be hard, but in her TED Talk, she challenges us to see these life transitions, the unknowns, not as endings, but as opportunities to become something new. Welcome to the show, Brooke.

Brooke: Oh my gosh, Alison, it is so nice to be on with you. Truly, truly, I've been a fan of yours for years. How are you?

Alison: I am doing well, and I'm glad to see that you're doing well.

Brooke: Yes, I am. I am. I'm coming out on the other side. My goodness, even as you talk about that, I can still feel it in my body, oh, just the mess, the uncomfortableness, the fear. Yes, all of that is true.

Alison: Let's get our listeners in on this conversation. Have you ever lost a job or had to reinvent yourself mid-career? How did you get through it? Are you still trying to figure it out? What have you tried? How have you been successful? Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in, join Brooke and I on the air, or you can reach out on social media at All Of It WNYC. I saw your TED Talk on LinkedIn. I was on LinkedIn. I was doing this stuff, keeping your profile up, and I saw so many of my friends looking for jobs. Then your TED Talk came up, and I was riveted by it.

Brooke: Oh, wow.

Alison: I wanted to know, first of all, why did you put out so-- It was so personal. You put out so much personal information in this TED Talk to a very public forum. Why did you do that?

Brooke: First of all, giving a TED Talk, I don't know about you, but for me, it was a bucket list moment. I knew when I was asked to give this TED Talk, the only answer was yes. Then I had that initial body response of, "Oh, gosh. I guess I could get up there and talk about the evolution and the evolution of cable news." I could speak, as an authority, on a few things, but then I knew I needed to tell the full truth, and the full truth was the story of how I really left my dream job, and how, ever since I was a little girl, a girl growing up in Atlanta and bringing binoculars to Braves Games, how I was always aware of CNN in my hometown and looking for Ted Turner at Fulton County Stadium all the way through landing this anchor job.

My goodness, Alison, what a career I had? I needed to stand up there and take a really deep breath and tell folks, "You know what? While it was a beautiful, privileged career I had, I also was unceremoniously let go for really no good reason." I think a lot of people right now, my own friends, folks who work in federal government, are all facing similar-- They're just, how I put it, drop-kicked out of their hard-earned careers.

I wanted to stand out there and say, essentially, "This is what happened to me. You're not alone. This is how I've been getting through it. Let me walk this walk right alongside you. In the end, I think if we can be in integrity with ourselves and in alignment, basically, having our insides match our outsides, then it's all going to be okay. It's brutal, but it's all going to be okay."

Alison: Let's go back to when you were at CNN. Who was CNN's Brook Baldwin? Who was she?

Brooke: She was a determined go-getting armor-wearing, deeply committed to capital GA journalism, giving voice to the voice list, not often saying the word no, mostly saying yes. Yes, I will go do that. Yes, I will do this interview. You want me to ask the question this way? Okay. All right. The teleprompter goes blank, you want me to do it this way? Okay. We live and we learn, and I'm a good southern girl who was brought up to color within the lines and to be kind and have grace and be tough and fierce, but not too tough and fierce, and certainly not speak up for myself the way I learned in the end I should have.

I wrote this whole piece for Vanity Fair a year ago, which is where I really started, baby-stepping into my truth of what really happened, and I own. I own. It wasn't just how I was treated, and how in the completion of my career happened. It was my own complicity in my own self-silencing, and that's a huge piece of all of this. I should have spoken up earlier. It took, Alison, writing my first book, which is called Huddle, which is all about the collective power of women.

I found all this free time to sit in rooms with just extraordinary women, both folks you would know and folks you may not, but their stories were incredible. I learned from them almost through osmosis, how to speak up, how to say no, which may sound bananas for people watching, since they would literally tune in and watch me speak for a living, but the dirty little secret was, I didn't speak up enough for myself.

Alison: You used the word armor. You had a certain armor around yourself. Was that physical? Was it the way you presented yourself?

Brooke: That's such a good question. I realized only after the fact it was a few things. For everyone listening, if you tuned into me, listen, you got me, you got the most me I knew to give in that moment, but I was armored up. It was tangible and intangible. What I didn't realize is every day that I would go into that building, whether it was Time Warner Center or over at Hudson Yards, and I'd roll in with jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers. Then you get into makeup and they-- Bless these ladies. They're artists, truly. I refer to it as the shellacking. I think once I got shellacked, the extensions and the lashes, and then I put on the fancy jewel-toned dresses and my red soled shoes, I was like, "Now I'm CNN's Brooke Baldwin and I'm going to do the thing."

Alison: [laughs]

Brooke: I think that was part of my armor, and part of my Armor was just having this giant entity that is CNN all around me. I think I lived in this illusion that I was safe, that I had this safety net under me. That's how it felt until I no longer had none of those things and woke up in profound fear for quite a while of, "Oh, I'm walking this tightrope. There's no net below. I'm not shellacked." It took me a minute to pull apart that identity and that armor and just find myself.

Alison: We got a lot of calls coming in. Let's take a couple. Let's talk to Caroline from Montclair. Hi, Caroline. Thanks for making the time to call All Of It.

Caroline: Hi, Alison. Thank you for answering my call. During COVID, I got laid off from my job. I was a technology executive. I really did some soul searching of, dude, do I want to spend the rest of my life staring at people on Zoom sitting in my chair, or do I want to pursue my dreams? I just did a complete pivot, and my dream was to become an interior designer. That is what I'm doing now. I started my own business. Right after, when I got laid off, all these, of course, the immediate reaction is, "Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry." My reaction was, "Don't be sorry. I just closed a book that I didn't want to read and started a new chapter at a good, juicy new book."

Alison: Caroline, thanks so much for calling in. Hearing Caroline's story, what did you hear there?

Brooke: Oh, my gosh. What I heard is this new phrase I use called a hidden gift. Sometimes the universe whispers, then she knocks, then she slams your forehead with a brick. You got to watch for the signs, and it sounds like in Caroline's case, with the brick, it was a blessing, it was a hidden gift. I, too, can totally relate, but it takes a minute. Let's not sugarcoat. It takes a minute. You got to lick your wounds and feel all the feels before you can really realize, as she said, "Gosh, I've been reading the wrong book all along. I really want to read this book." It takes a minute, but you'll get there.

Alison: We're talking with Brooke Baldwin after a decade, millions of living rooms as an anchor. She's now out of her "dream job," and she's looking for something new. We'll hear about that in a minute. Listeners, we want to hear about your reinvention of yourself. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's talk to Peter, who is calling in from Bayside. Peter, you're on the air.

Peter: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. It's a pleasure to talk with you. I'm actually on my third career. I was in the right place at the right time, but I was the wrong person for my first one, where I was in operations on Wall Street. I transitioned, and I ended up doing slide presentations that having a graphic design firm in the '90s and the early 2000s, and did websites, but it went by me. I just couldn't make it happen, and after a long transition.

I helped my mom and my dad in their elderly years. My mother got dementia, and I found a career that allowed me to help other people. I'm what's called a daily money manager, and I help people pay their bills, et cetera. Now I love it because I'm making money, but I'm also helping others. I'm in the right place at the right time, and I'm the right person. This is a great time for people to enter the senior service industries, no matter what they are. The key is hopefully to love what you do, and I'm fortunate to have found that.

Alison: Peter, love the story. Thank you so much for sharing. Brooke, you said in your former career that you were a yes person. Yes, yes, yes.

Brooke: Yes. [laughs]

Alison: Looking back, what did that cost you to be a yes person?

Brooke: Oh, my gosh. Ultimately, it cost me my integrity. It cost me my integrity because I think we either subscribe to what I would refer to as hustle culture, the shoulds. What we should be doing, how we should be living and working, and the money we should be making versus our true essence. Peter was describing, I think, ultimately helping older folks, and that sounds like that is his true nature, his passion, but he was in the right place at the right time initially.

I remember sitting in my fancy CNN anchor seats each and every afternoon toward the end there. I could feel like just because you're really good at the thing that you are doing doesn't necessarily mean that is in alignment with your true essence and your true nature. It's a really funny thing, funny, not so ha ha funny, that, how do you extricate yourself from a really well-paying job and health insurance and sometimes incredible coworkers, many of whom I had.

How do you pull yourself out of that when you just start hearing that whisper? You start hearing that whisper of, is this truly in alignment with who I am deep, deep down inside? Do I need to actually clean my mirror, polish my internal mirror, and maybe find what is best for me? I think that's so much a part of it is you can be good at it, but it may not be the thing you really, really want to be doing.

Alison: Did you have a turning point? Was there a story or a guest you had that made you just wake up and say, "Wait a minute, I need to make a change?"

Brooke: It was 2015, and there was a man who came down the escalator in Trump Tower. Then that to me was before that and after that, and that became the delineation point for me of how, when Donald Trump declared he wanted to run for president, the first go round, I just felt like the way we covered news, at least from a cable news sense, fundamentally changed.

I hung in for a number of years after that, but I never quite felt needing to interrupt guests, being encouraged to have fights on the air, not really being able to sit in the deep end and listen. That's not currency, at least that wasn't when I was on the air. That's just not who I am. I played one on TV really well. I played really well for a while until I was just not in alignment with my true self. God bless CNN, I can now say this, for telling me to go away. At the time, it was little traumatizing, but now I see that just wasn't for me anymore. It wasn't for me.

Alison: Let's take some more calls. Sienna, I believe she's in Manhattan. Hi. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Sienna: Hi. This is Sienna. I was laid off earlier this year from a DEI educational equity-focused nonprofit. Similar to the previous color, it was a blessing in disguise. I'm 26. I'm pretty early on in my career, but it basically set me free from a job that I had felt so beaten down by and so taken advantage of for so long, especially as a young woman of color working in the equity space. Coincidentally, I had started job searching a few months earlier, very slowly, but a couple of weeks after getting laid off, I got an offer for the job that I'm in now, which is at a parks nonprofit. I get to work in the parks with people who are also obsessed with trees and parks and nature and everything.

Brooke: [laughs]

Sienna: It's really turned out super well for me, and I'm still in the nonprofit space, still doing things that I care about. This topic is way more in alignment than what I was working on previously.

Alison: Congrats to you. Let's talk to Ezrael. This is a great story. He's calling in from Westchester. Ezrael, what were you trained as?

Ezrael: I was trained as a neurosurgeon, and that's what I've been doing for 47 years.

Brooke: Wow.

Ezrael: [laughs] I'm blessed to be able to have done that. It's been an amazing career, and it's been fabulous. As a neurosurgeon, you use your brain a lot and your skills, your dexterity. You don't get to use your emotions very much, and you don't get to use your creative side much at all, really. You could argue that to some extent, but I won't get into that. Truly, I realized that I needed to be able to express my creative side. I had really come to realize in my 40s, I had suppressed my love of acting, which is a whole other story [chuckles] we'll get into right now.

I then started taking acting classes and then started doing some theater. I had a fabulous director in a play I did. She was a very well-known director. She said, "You can do this professionally. I will help you, and I will introduce you to everyone you need to know, but you have to agree to one thing: you have to do it full-time." At that time, I was 15 years into my career with 2 kids and married, and I just couldn't give up what I was doing as a neurosurgeon to do full-time acting, so I put it aside.

Now, as I'm beginning to edge out of my neurosurgical career, I'm really looking seriously into retiring from that, I started to get back into acting. I took classes with Josh Pais, who's wonderful, and Jeffrey Tambor. Then I realized it was time to get out on my own. I put myself out on backstage and other sites where they look for actors, and I started to get a lot of options. I've done now nine short films, five feature films.

Brooke: Wow.

Ezrael: The film that I co-star in was in the Khan Atlas Festival, and it was going to be in the New York Film Festival.

Alison: Excellent.

Brooke: It's been extraordinary. [chuckles]

Alison: We love it. Thank you so much for calling in. I love that story.

Brooke: Oh my gosh, that is amazing. First of all, bless, 47 years as a neurosurgeon. I can't imagine anyone-- How incredible to be doing that profession. Also, we have these tugs on our heart and our soul of, but I'm also interested in this and I'm also interested in this. I love how he had that tug early on, wasn't ready to give up neurosurgery full time, and now 47 years later is should we get his autograph?

[laughter]

Brooke: It sounds like he's blowing up, which is so, so incredible. I think just for people listening, if you are one of those people, it's still in the thing in the job where you're having those tugs, you're not quite sure if you're in full alignment, but you're paying the bills, you're keeping the lights on, just pay attention, pay attention, write it down, journal, meditate on it if that's your thing. It's so important to have a sense of self-belief because once you make that leap into, we'll call it your soul work, a lot of people are going to say, "What do you think you're doing? You're a neurosurgeon trying to be on stage." You have to truly believe in yourself, and then the path will be carved out ahead of you. I really believe that.

Alison: Listeners, have you had to reinvent yourself after losing a job or going through a major life change? How did it turn out? Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more of your calls, and we'll have more with Brooke Baldwin after a quick break.

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Alison: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Brooke Baldwin. After more than a decade of diving into your living rooms as a host, as an anchor on CNN, she lost her job, but now she's looking at the possibility of becoming someone new. It is her new sort of mantra. You've talked about it as Brooke, and unraveling is what happened to you. What happens when one unravels?

Brooke: Gosh. I think, initially, when people hear the word unraveling, they think, "Uh-oh," it's something negative or bad. Don't let the un fool you. I think to unravel is to loosen to unnot to free up. It's to become anything, to become whatever you want to be. I really believe that we are all at some stage of unraveling in our lives. We either are young and we have yet to unravel, or we are currently on that journey of unraveling, or we have already unraveled, and maybe we're re-raveling anew.

I was just sitting with some girlfriends last night, all of us are deep in our unraveling journeys at the moment. I was saying to them, "I really believe that we're born with all the tools, we're born with these dreams, maybe sometimes dreams deferred, and then life happens and the hustle happens and culture happens and the shoulds happen, and we go off on our various directions."

"Then at some point we have this kind of frying pan to the forehead moment, whether it is forced upon you, a divorce, an ending of a career, a health scare, and it makes you stop." I'm from the South, so we would say like, "have a come to Jesus moment," where what is it that my truest sense really feels called to do? That to me is a hidden gift. It doesn't always feel that way at the time, but if we can just follow that true north, I really believe that leads to like full truth, full integrity, full happiness.

Alison: How long did it take you to go from being CNN's Brooke Baldwin to just Brooke Baldwin?

Brooke: Woof, girl, I'm still in it. It's been 4 years since I signed off of my show on CNN. I think it took me a solid year to pull those letters out of my heart and mind. I actually ran into Maria Shriver recently, and when she speaks, I listen. She just gave me sort of unsolicited advice, just saying, "Brooke, you will always be--" This is for anyone in whatever profession, however long you've been doing something.

She's like, "You will always be a journalist. You're not a journalist because of the three letters. You're a journalist because you're Brooke Baldwin." I really appreciated that. Then beyond that, it's like life is whatever you want to make it. It's all about like bringing all of that into who you are and then following your nose on what is your truest nature, truest self.

Alison: How long did it take you to get rid of the anchor clothes? Took me a while to get rid of my anchor clothes.

Brooke: Oh my gosh.

[laughter]

Brooke: So such a good question. For people listening, I had closets full of these fancy, beautiful. I've held onto a couple pieces that just meant so much to me, and they're just collecting dust in my closet. I'll tell you, I grabbed a stylist friend, and between the two of us, we sold a bunch of them. I gave most of the money to, I think it was Brandi Carlile's nonprofit. That just felt right. I love the idea of gifting these beautiful pieces to people to go on their own career journeys. Hell yes, I'm a jeans and a sneakers girl. It has been so interesting finding my own style now as a professional. It's not that I wasn't those clothes, but that was part of my armor for sure. I see you nodding, yes, you can relate.

Alison: It was hard. Got rid of all the blazers, all the blazers, all gone. [laughs]

Brooke: Never want to see a blazer again. [laughs]

Alison: This text says, "I was editor of my college paper and planned on a career in journalism. Instead entered publishing and PR and found it completely unfulfilling. I flipped the switch and recently early retired at after a 25-year career as a York City public middle school teacher. Exhausting, challenging, and totally fulfilling." That is from Ellen in Jackson Heights. Let's talk to Steve, who's calling in. Hi, Steve. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Steve: Hi, Alison. Hi, Brooke. Brooke, I used to work with you at CNN in the New York bureau years ago. I was the New York correspondent for CNN radio.

Brooke: Oh my gosh, yes, Steve.

Steve: How are you? [chuckles]

Brooke: Hi.

Steve: You were one of the nicest, kindest people to work with in the New York bureau. I'm so happy to hear your voice again. You're both talking about reinventing yourselves. Alison, you and I go way back. I was at WDRE years ago. I started off as a DJ [chuckles] before I got into journalism. I really like this topic a lot because during the pandemic, the unit I was working for in journalism was shut down for financial reasons, and I spend a couple of years trying to figure out what am I going to do next? Who am I? What do I do? Do I still want to do journalism?

Recently, I seized the opportunity to go back to school. I'm one of the oldest students in the CUNY Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, and I'm getting my master's degree because I never got my master's. After 30 years of doing journalism the same way, I wanted to figure out how to do it in new ways. You get into a rut doing it on that hamster wheel day after day after day, and suddenly you realize journalism is doing it in totally new ways and you haven't learned those new ways.

That's what I'm trying to do right now. Figure out what it is I do, what makes me happy. Instead of trying to fit myself into these job roles, these descriptions, I'm learning that what I need to do is figure out what value I bring to a new institution when I'm starting to look for a job, and that's what's going to make me happy. It's not trying to fit into somebody else's idea of what you are, right?

Brooke: Yes.

Alison: It's really important. I do want to say this, that for some people, they don't have the finances to be able to do this. That's a very important thing to bring up at this point.

Brooke: About to say. Yes. It's, on the one hand, inspiring to listen to his talk. On the other, it's cute for people who-- You got to keep the lights on. A lot of people listening are leaders in the family and the community at work. They may be not as happy, not as fulfilled, but they may feel stuck, like there is no other option. I just want to say, oof, I see you. I see you. It's not like this cute kumbaya moment where you can just say, "Where does my soul feel called? I'm just going to leave this job." I get that.

I think it's key to make sure, as you are keeping the lights on and being responsible in that job that may not be that perfect fit for you, that you are still doing other things on the side to keep your soul satisfied, whether it's a hobby or how you spend time with your kids, what books you're reading. That may have absolutely nothing to do with the thing that you do when you clock in day in, day out, but it scratches something within you that feels incredibly fulfilling.

That would just be my piece of advice, is to make sure-- You never know. I really believe certain books are placed in front of us or suggested for us for reasons that are outside of our world of comprehension, and those are just breadcrumbs for you in the path. Just pay attention. You never know.

Alison: My guest has been Brooke Baldwin. You should watch her TED Talk. Brooke, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Brooke: So fun. Thank you, Alison. Thank you, everyone, for calling in.